I don’t notice it at first, because it’s dark outside, there are no lights on inside, and I can’t see more than a few feet in front of my face without my specs. But when he comes into the bedroom and starts lighting the candles that are all over the place, then sits down on the bed beside me, I notice his hands.
“What is that?”
He looks at the dark, rust-colored smear on the back of one hand and tries to wipe it on his coat sleeve. When it doesn’t work, he chooses to simply ignore my question.
“Here. This should be enough to find a match.”
He sets a bulky pillowcase on my lap.
“What’s in this?”
“You’d know if you looked.”
I pull it open and peer inside, surprised by what I find. “There’s like four hundred pairs of eyeglasses in here.”
“You have a flair for exaggeration. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Yes. My creative writing teacher in college described my aggrandizement of language as incredible.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t a compliment.”
“I got an A in that class.”
“Because he knew if he failed you, you’d have to take the class again. He couldn’t bear to live through that twice. Try the glasses on. I’ll get you something to eat.”
He rises from the bed and goes around the cabin lighting candles while I try on pair after pair, looking for one strong enough. I call out, “Why don’t you have electricity?”
“I do have electricity,” he answers from the next room. “I just don’t like fluorescent lights.”
“So get LED.”
“Don’t like those, either.”
I guess I should count myself lucky that he likes indoor plumbing.
“Oh! I found a pair that works!”
With clear vision, I look around the room in awe.
The walls and floor are made entirely of knotty polished wood the color of honey. Heavy beams run the width of the ceiling. The doors are wood, too, and so is the bed I’m lying in, which looks hand carved. There are several colorful wool blankets on the bed, and a large dark brown fur that I suspect is from a real animal.
A real big animal. Maybe a bear.
The furnishings are simple, rustic, and also have that hand carved feel. There is no computer, television, or clock in the room, but there is a bookcase and a fireplace.
There’s also an enormous stuffed moose head on the wall opposite me, gazing down at me with black glass eyes.
It’s terrifying.
Mal returns to the room, and my terror increases.
“Oh, my god,” I whisper, seeing him.
His face is covered with the same rust-colored splatter and smears that are on his hands. It’s dried now, but I can tell from the way it dripped and ran down his jaw that it was once liquid.
Once-bright-red liquid that has turned dark from exposure to air.
“What?”
“You have blood all over you.”
He reacts to that horrible piece of news as if I’ve just told him my zodiac sign: with total indifference.
He sets a tray on my bedside table, shucks off his heavy wool coat, throws it on a chair, then pulls his black Henley off and tosses that on top of the coat. Then he’s standing there naked from the waist up, and I’m sitting in bed with my mouth hanging open, wondering if maybe I’m suffering from a severe brain injury as well as a gunshot wound.
It’s not possible for a human to be that beautiful.
I blink to clear my vision, but all I see swimming before my eyes are acres of muscular flesh decorated by a constellation of tattoos. His bulk is only surpassed by his height, which is only surpassed by the gut punch of that V thing leading from his washboard abs downward, like a pair of muscle arrows pointing to the goodies in his crotch.
He’s tatted, ripped, and altogether masculine.
Devastated, I look away.
I’ve been blinded. He’s seared my eyeballs. I’ll never be able to see again.
He sits on the edge of the bed and picks up a bowl of steaming liquid from the tray, as if all this is completely natural. As if he walks around half naked with blood on his hands and face every day.
Which, considering his line of work, is a possibility.
“Take a few deep breaths,” he says calmly, stirring a spoon around in the bowl. He knows my brain is malfunctioning.
“I wonder how many times you’ll have to tell me that by the end of this week,” I say weakly, wanting to fan my burning face.
He holds the spoon to my lips and waits for me to piece myself back together. When I finally do, I manage to swallow a delicious spoonful of soup.
My assassin kidnapper’s homemade soup that he’s feeding to me like a baby.
I’ve lost my mind. That’s the only explanation.
“Were you able to rest while I was gone?”
“Some.”
He feeds me another spoonful of soup. “How’s your pain level?”
“Splendiferous.”
“Try again without the sarcasm.”
“On a scale of one to ten, it’s a forty-seven.”
“Without exaggeration, too. If you can manage it.”
I accept another spoonful, trying to look anywhere but at his chest.
Dear god, his chest. His breasts are beautiful. Pecs, I mean. Is that what they’re called?
I’ve lost half my vocabulary in the past sixty seconds.
“Riley. Your pain. How is it?”
“Right, sorry. Um…painful.”
He gives me a stern look, but I’m too distracted to find it scary.
“Why do you have blood on you?”
“Work. How’s your pain?”
“A little better. Or at least not worse.”
He seems satisfied by that, nodding and holding out another spoonful of soup. We’re both quiet as I finish the bowl, staring alternately at the blankets, the wall, the ceiling, and the terrifying moose, anywhere but at him and his devastating beauty.
Then he sets the spoon and bowl aside and announces he’s going to take a shower.
He stands and heads to the bathroom, leaving me flattened on the bed, drained of energy by the sight of his body and the single word he used to explain the blood.
Work.
He was working today.
Doing assassin stuff.
Killing people.
My brain refuses to get a handle on it. I simply can’t reconcile the idea of Mal the gentle, attentive caretaker who cleans my wounds and feeds me soup with Mal the guy who blows people away for a living. Who came to Bermuda to kill Declan.
Who may or may not have wanted to kill me.
I’m thousands of miles from home, injured, in horrible pain, in a foreign country I was brought to while unconscious, where I might die of complications from the gunshot my bodyguard gave me or the bootleg surgery I underwent to repair it.
This is just too fucking much.
I start to cry again, hating myself with every tear that falls.
Sloane wouldn’t cry in this situation. She’d already have made an escape vehicle from the moose head and burned the cabin down.
When Mal returns to the bedroom, I’m lying with my arms flung over my face, dragging in big, shuddering gulps of air.
He pulls my arms away from my face and stares down into my watering eyes. Then he says something that sounds gentle and soothing, but I can’t understand a word of it because it’s in Russian.
“You know I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes. Which is why I didn’t say it in English.”
“That’s not nice.”
“You wouldn’t think that if you knew what I said.”
Biting my lip, I stare up at him. His wet hair is slicked back off his face. The white terrycloth towel wrapped around his waist is the only thing he’s wearing. He smells like clean skin and healthy male in his prime, and holy Ghost of Christmas Past, I can’t look at him for one second longer.
I close my eyes, turn my head, and whisper, “Why did you bring me here?”
He gently folds my arms over my chest and sits beside me. I can feel him looking at me, but refuse to open my eyes. After a moment, he asks his own question, ignoring mine.
“Why did you take a bullet for me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me the truth.”
His voice is low and urgent. I imagine those beautiful green eyes gazing down at me with their usual penetrating intensity and wish with all my heart that I didn’t currently look like I’ve been sleeping under a bridge.
I take a deep breath, let it out, and tell him the ridiculous truth in a voice so small, he probably can’t even hear it.
“Because I didn’t want you to die.”
His silence is long and intense. He exhales. Then he lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it, brushing his mouth softly across my knuckles, turning my hand over and pressing his lips against my open palm.
He rises from the bed without another word.
I hear him moving around the room, opening and closing drawers. His footsteps recede. When they return, I open my eyes to find him fully dressed, boots and all. He lowers himself into the big brown leather chair in the corner.
He folds his hands over his stomach, tilts his head back, and closes his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to sleep. So should you.”
“You’re gonna sleep in that chair?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“How can you sleep sitting upright? Isn’t there a sofa in the other room that you can lie down on?”
He lifts his head and looks at me. “Stop worrying about me.”
“But—”
“Stop.”
When he can tell I’m about to start pestering him again, he says gruffly, “Yes, there’s a sofa. No, I’m not going to sleep on it. I need to be in this room. I need to hear if you cry out. I have to know if you’re in pain or you need anything. Don’t ask me why, because I won’t tell you. Now go to fucking sleep.”
His eyes blaze at me for a few moments longer, until he closes them again and I’m released from their burning power.
